


Black Ops

by Arision



Series: Spoiled Prince 'Verse [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Army life as told by an fairly clueless civilian, Army life kind of sucks, Gen, Graphic Violence, Hux's life BEFORE he met Kylo, Since hux is not part of the Frat party lifestyle, Sorry No Kylo here, The Mission Files, it's black ops, that's the military, vaguely, what did you expect?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-14 22:53:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9208742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arision/pseuds/Arision
Summary: The un-redacted missions of Armitage Hux and his squad of Army Black Ops elite.  Otherwise know as actually explaining all those missions I only alluded to in 'Does It Have A Name'.





	

For [JanSykes](http://archiveofourown.org/users/JanSykes/pseuds/JanSykes), because she asked. For [MyThoughtCrime](http://mythoughtcrime.tumblr.com/tagged/spoiled%20prince%20au), because she lets me play.

 

Thanks again for the beta, [Oforlikealune](http://oforlikelalune.tumblr.com/).

* * *

The machine gun is heavy in his hands.  He’s swaying just a little in his boots, which were issued a size too large.  How the army thought his feet were the size of Captain Phasma’s is beyond him.  

 

She’s ahead of him in the graying half-light of dawn, scouting.They’re sliding along a side street parallel to the main boulevard of Pilies Street. This seems to be what will probably be just one more false alarm or wild goose chase that Colonel Armitage Hux and his squad must endure.  He hasn’t slept in close to forty-eight hours, beyond painfully short catnaps.  The respite has kept him going temporarily, but he knows when this mission is over, there will be hell to pay.

 

The muzzle of his gun taps sharply into the stone of the building he’s sliding along the wall of.  The sound sends the whole squad jumping, and he grimaces, readjusts his grip.  His biceps feel like overcooked noodles.

 

They’ve been searching for Russian insurgents for nearly twenty four hours, with absolutely no sign.  He’s swaying again.  They still have half the grid to go.

 

* * *

_“You cannot be serious.”_

 

_His commanding officer cuts a look at him, and he amends himself swiftly._

 

_“...Sir.”_

 

_“I am entirely serious, Colonel. Vilnius is becoming a hotbed of Soviet activity, especially as they use it to fuel Al Qaeda cells with arms and munitions.”_

 

_Hux is pretty sure that the_ Americans _were the ones who had outfitted Al Qaeda...over a decade ago, and were simply trying to cover up another hairbrained scheme that had bitten them in the ass.  He does not, however, voice this thought.  He simply shifts his weight more comfortably at parade rest, and says nothing._

 

_“You are to take your squad and do a full recon on the city.”_

 

_A squad...to recon an entire city?_

 

_“Sir, that’s highly inefficient.  It will take days.”_

 

_The other officer doesn’t even bother to look up from his files._

 

_“Exactly.  We need this done with subtlety, Colonel.”_

 

_“Sir, there has not been any sort of suspicious activity in Vilnius in close to twenty years.  Why the sudden interest?”_

_The colonel signs, slaps his pen down as if Hux had said something personally offensive, rather than justified.  He’s treated to a silent glare for a few minutes.  Since Hux is familiar with this particular behavior (and stopped being affected by it at age eight…), he simply stands his ground and stares blankly back._

 

_At last, the colonel gives another huffy sigh, and shrugs._

 

_“You might be in the works for a promotion, but this is the Army, Colonel.  The powers that be don’t explain themselves to me.  And unless you actually hold higher rank than I do, I don’t explain myself to_ you _. Dismissed.”_

 

_“Sir.”_

 

_Hux contemplates how worth dishonorable discharge it would be to simply punch this man in the face. With a chair.  Instead, he salutes and turns on heel._

 

* * *

 

Hux just wants to sleep. A van with blacked out windows drives by, slow in the early morning light, like the driver shares Hux’s exhaustion.

 

They turn down one of the side streets toward a residential area, the way becoming more narrow and confined.  He finds himself wishing for a cigarette, heady smoke filling his lungs to bursting.  Wants the light headed feeling of relaxation instead of headache and sore feet.

 

Ahead of him, Phasma stops.  He watches her cock her head to the side, and in that moment, something seems...off.  He can’t say what, but somewhere in his gut, something is very, _very_ wrong.

 

Hux spins silently, the sudden surge of adrenaline overcoming his exhaustion.  His hand comes up in a fist, causing his squad to freeze in place.  His eyes flick back and forth, scanning roof tops and side streets.

 

Nothing.

 

Nothing at all.

 

And yet he can’t shake-

 

“Sir?”

 

It’s a new recruit.  Raw, barely enough combat experience under his belt to warrant his promotion into Hux’s squad of elites.  He has potential...if he’d stop talking so much.

 

Hux makes a motion for silence.

 

Another car whizzes by, loud in the strangely silent street.  Hux realizes what seems so odd.

 

It’s almost dawn, but absolutely no people are about.  Not a one.

 

A third car passes by, slower than the one before.  He glances over.  Realizes this is the exact same van.  He’s turning to Phasma even as the vehicle slows further.

 

“Phasma, look-”

 

They come from all sides, some even rappelling over the edges of the roofs.  Gun shots ricochet off of stucco and wood, and two of Hux’s squad go down with screams of agony and crimson spouts of blood.  Hux slams into the wall. Glass shatters somewhere, and a woman screeches.

 

His gun falls from his hands as his attacker attempts to bash his skull open on the house they are pressed up against.  A quick glance shows curtains drawn all along the alleyway.  Then he’s snapping an elbow back into his opponent’s face, hearing a cry and feeling cartilage crunch.

 

He palms a knife from his sleeve, turns, and slashes.  The insurgent goes down with a spray of blood that catches Hux in the eyes.  He reaches up quickly to wipe it away, but this is all the time another attacker needs to come after him.

 

They tangle, fall to the ground in their struggle. His knife lands nearby with a clatter barely heard above the rapor of gunshots. The pavement is hard beneath his back as he struggles to keep the other man from closing meaty hands about his windpipe.

 

He’s failing.

 

A dark blur rockets out from the right, knocking Hux’s would-be executioner over onto the street.

 

Mitaka.

 

Who is now on the receiving end of his own strangle hold.  Hux’s knife is to the left.  He scrambles for it, then plants it between the assailant’s shoulder blades while still on his knees.  The man wheezes, then starts to collapse onto Mitaka.  A quick shove sends his dead weight into the ground instead.

 

Hux collapses next to his lieutenant, both panting.  Mitaka looks up at him with big eyes.

 

“Thanks, Sir!”

 

“Thank you, Lieutenant.”

 

Mitaka grins, and then his dark eyes focus on something over Hux’s right shoulder.  He begins to fling himself forward, shouting,

 

“Sir, look out!”

 

Hux turns.

 

Straight into pain lancing across his face, and the spray of blood that is his own.  His hands scrabble to cup against the right side of his face, pulsing with agony.  Two more brutes crash into Mitaka, leaving Hux to face off against the knife-wielding woman.  Heat burns along his right shoulder as a bullet grazes him.

 

Something is wrong with his sight.  Everything seems strange, tilted, off balance.  Depth seems different, and colors a little strange.  His attacker leaps at him, and he barely manages to scramble out of the blade’s path, head singing with pain.

 

She lashes out with a foot, catches him in the stomach.  He falls onto his back, cracking his head against the ground.  

 

Hux is fairly sure that if he doesn’t die in the next few moments, he is going to be sick all over himself.  The woman lands on him, slamming his head back against the pavement again.  Black spots dance through his already destroyed vision.

 

“Phas- _ma_!”

 

He scrabbles at his attackers stabbing hands, getting several nicks as he barely moves the knife away from his chest in time.  Repeatedly.

 

There’s a grunt further down the alley, timed perfectly between the sound of gunshots.

 

“Busy right now.”

 

Hux bucks his hips, unbalancing his assailant long enough to grab her chin between both hands and twist.  There is a sick crunch, her eyes bulge, and then she drops as dead weight.  He scrambles out from beneath the body, throwing himself toward his abandoned gun as two more insurgents move toward him.  He carefully does not think about the new recruit, lying in a growing pool of blood on his back a few feet away.  His eyes are glassy and unfocused in death.

 

Instead, he dodges grabbing arms, rolling onto his back and steadying himself against the corpse of his fallen comrade.

 

“Sooner rather than later, if you please!” he shrieks over the din, not sure if she hears.  

 

Then he’s firing at the incoming fighters.  Only...his aim is off.  Horrendously so.  He’s aiming for hearts, eyes, skulls, and if he’s lucky, he’s hitting legs, shoulders, occasionally an abdomen.

 

There’s blood soaking through his pants from the body behind him.  He can feels the heat, and the metallic smell is invading his nostrils, along with the reek of death.  His hands are shaking, and he spares a very, very brief thought to wonder if this is where he dies, in an alley surrounded by his dying me, on the orders of a moron.

 

He raises his gun again, lays down enough fire to buy himself some breathing room, and then fumbles for his radio.  He calls a quick mayday into the channel, then yells for Phasma again.

 

“Any time, here, Phasma!”

 

“Keep your shirt on!”

 

“‘Tis my head I worry about!”

 

Mitaka is there, suddenly, laying down cover fire over his shoulder, and Hux’s left ear finally gives up.  

 

Now sound, too, is skewed, a mixture of battle and far off ringing. Hux feels dizzy, disoriented.  All at once, both he and Mitaka run out of ammunition.  A pair of minorly injured combatants head toward them.  He scrabbles for another knife, tries to get to his feet, but can’t.

 

_“Phasma!”_

 

Was that him sounding high pitched and terrified?  He honestly has no idea anymore.  One combatant takes Mitaka, knocking him from view.  The other raises his knife, almost theatrically high Hux thinks in the far back of his mind.

 

Then there is a spout of red, a blade sticking out of the other man’s eye, and he goes down with a thud.  It takes Hux an embarrassingly long time to process what has happened.  He whips his head to look around.  Phasma is nearly ten yards behind him, straightening from her throw.  He feels so lost at this moment, he can’t think of much to say beyond:

 

“Took your sweet time about it...”

 

She makes a disgusted noise and points her pistol at Mitaka’s attacker.  Her bullet takes the man in the side, and Mitaka’s knife finishes the job.

 

Then there is silence.

 

Hux looks around, noting another lieutenant further down the alleyway who is stumbling his way toward them with his arm held at an awkward angle.  Unamo leans against a building, curled in on herself and shaking.  He turns to Mitaka when the other man makes a distressed noise.

 

“Sir, sir, are you...well, you’re not, obviously, but…”

 

“Mitaka, what on Earth are you _blathering_ about?  And where in bloody buggering _hell_ is backup?! If those bum-fuckers are just _sitting around_ with their thumbs up their orificies, I will _skin_ the-”

 

He tries to get to his feet, fails.  Lands on his knees and feels the impact reverberate through his entire body to set his skull on fire.

 

“Well...damn.” he says simply, and then his remaining ear is roaring and the pavement rushes up to meet him.

 

* * *

 

It’s a farce, really.  This ceremony where they pin some useless bit of shiny on Hux’s uniform, blathering on about ‘loyalty’ and ‘integrity’ and ‘leadership under fire’.

 

What leadership?  Almost two-thirds of his squad had died in that alley.  He’d done such great leading, hadn’t he, that they were going home in bags to parents and sibling and loved ones who would weep and mourn.  

 

Integrity? Loyalty? To what?  A bunch of mewling, gasping, clueless _idiots_ who think his people’s lives are numbers and nothing more? Idiots exactly like his father.

 

He’d wanted to be one of them.  He _had_ been one of them, hadn’t he, to get this far?  With a General’s rank on his uniform, now, and his old CO saluting and calling him ‘sir’?  Hux knows he’d trade every single bar of rank to have his soldiers breathing again.  He wants to shout and scream and kill everyone who is clapping and shaking his hand and telling him ‘Well done, son.  You’re a credit to this country.’ while not looking at the eyepatch for too long.  He thinks he’s going to be sick all over the stage.

 

Instead, he breathes firmly through his nose against each wave of nausea.  He salutes, shakes hands, poses for photos, _glad handles_.  For hours.  When it’s over, he goes straight to his office and begins to pack what few personals he has into a back on his desk.  Phasma finds him there.  She leans against the door for a short while, silent and watchful, tucking a file under her arm.  At last, she speaks.

 

“Major General Armitage Hux.  That’s quite the mouthful. How nice of them to bump you up an extra stripe because they’re shit at their own jobs.”

 

He glances up at her, then back down to his task. He knows that’s not what she wants to talk about, and he’s not in the mood to banter until she gets around to it.  His silence irritates her, if the huff is anything to go by. It also speeds up the process of Phasma getting to her point.

 

“Personal reasons.  That’s what you went with?”

 

He focuses on wrapping some useless tchotchky that had been a gift from Mitaka his first holiday with the squad.  Far too cutesy and fragile for Hux’s taste, but he’d kept it because seeing it at the corner of Hux’s desk had always made Mitaka smile.  When the paper pads it to his satisfaction, he tucks it carefully into the box.

 

Phasma growls, and stalk into the space to slam a piece of official looking paper down on his desk.  He glances at it.  They are discharge approval papers for one Phamsa, Elianora, Captain.  He feels a little fuzzy, like he’s just had his head bounced against cobblestones again.  He looks up into her angry face.

 

“You really should be a Lieutenant Colonel by now…”

 

She glares.

 

“Phasma, I am unsure what you expect me to say.  You should not throw your career away just because I am.”

 

He feels as though her eyeroll is unnecessary.

 

“ _Je_ -sus, you sound like my mother.  Why does every jumped-up fuddy-duddy assume the only reason people perform similar actions is because they’re copying each other?”

 

Hux is also sure he should be more offended by that statement than he is.  Instead, he slant a look at her.

 

“Can you honestly say this-” he gestures at the paper, “-is not because of...Vilnius…?”

 

It’s hard to even talk about the city.  He swallows bile, even while knowing time will help easy this, at least a little.  Phasma blinks too fast for a moment, and then clears her throat.

 

“I’m not saying our reasons aren’t the same.  I’m saying I’m not doing this just because you are.”

 

“I see.”

 

“Do you.”

 

There’s a snippy remark on the tip of his tongue, when someone clears their throat from the doorway.  It’s hesitant in the way only Mitaka can be.  They both turn.

 

He’s curled a little in on himself, one arm holding the other at the elbow.

 

“Can I crash the party?” he asks softly.  He’s carrying a brown paper bag in his other hand that clinks as he moves further into the office.  When he pulls everything out, it turns out to be a bottle of platinum label scotch and four glasses.  Hux raises his eyebrows. Phasma whistles.  Platinum label is not cheap.  Mitaka shrugs.

 

“I didn’t want to stint on your going away celebration as it is.  Unamo and Crassov are still in medbay and can’t have any, or I’d have lured you both down there.”

 

He opens the bottle, pours a generous measure into each glass, hands them each one.  The fourth remains on the desk.  A silent salute to the absent, whatever the form.  They raise the glasses silently in unity and then take a sip.  

 

Hux breathes out through his nose, savoring the flavor of alcohol and barrel on his tongue. Swallows. Mitaka makes a pleased sound to his left.

 

Phasma knocks the rest back and slams the glass on the desk.  Deliberately wrinkles her nose. He knows it’s deliberate because he’s seen her chug rotgut without a whimper.

 

“I’ve no idea how you two can drink this shit.  Expensive or not, it still tastes like licking a rotting tree.”

 

Mitaka snorts.

 

“Hey, not all of us need to hide the taste of alcohol behind fruity flavors.”

 

“If the words ‘like real men’ come out of your mouth, Dophie, I will suplex you into this floor.”

 

“I’m just saying-”

 

“Yeah, you should just not-”

 

“If you don’t like-”

 

“Do you even know what a suplex _is_ , Dopheld?”

 

Hux feels the corner of his mouth twitch up, closes his eyes to listen to them banter.  He’s going to miss this.  He doesn’t notice Phasma slipping a photo into his box of belonging.  

 

Hux won’t find it until he moves into his new apartment in the city, where it will already be crumpled and folded by the careless hands of the moving company and the other contents in the box.  When he does, he will take to the grave the fact that he sobbed over it for an hour.  Then immediately ordered a frame for it online, like some sentimental idiot.

 

In the photo is the remainder of his team looking back at the camera from the forests outside Vilnius.  Unamo is supported by Mitaka’s arm around her shoulders, and Crassov has his arm in a sling.  Hux, bloody bandages obscuring half his face, gazes emptily at the ground.

  
Phasma isn’t in the picture, but that doesn’t both Hux.  He knows who was holding the camera, which is what really matters.

* * *

 

Explaining [this](http://68.media.tumblr.com/30654a2f22c7e3ee3710a6fb295307f4/tumblr_o7d2a1Q9Sr1v5ohcgo1_1280.png) photo.  Come scream at me on [Tumblr](http://shifting-iris.tumblr.com/).  See you next time!

 


End file.
